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Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

technologyreview.com

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Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#41

Post by kilroy123 »

pseudonym wrote: post #27
smeyer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this? Self-driving cars seem reasonably close whereas there doesn't seem to be anything resembling what you're proposing. Also, aren't autopilot systems successful in commercial air vehicles because they operate high up away from most everything other than a few birds and other commercial air vehicles and they maintain massive separation between vehicles (compared to roads)? This wouldn't seem to sca…

It depends on how "reasonably close" they end up coming. If it ends up being a xeno's paradox of issues where it can handle 90% of situations, then 99%, then 99.9%, then 99.99%, etc, but each of those incremental improvements prove harder and harder to achieve, how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's ma…

At least now there are multiple companies and organizations working on these problems. I just hope, there will be some openness and sharing across all these teams.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#42

Post by frik »

teuobk wrote: post #6

So what if the car can't drive itself in anything other than familiar roads during clear weather? I would guess that the majority of my current driving is done under those conditions. If the car could take care of itself most of the time but fell back to my control during rain, snow, obscure roads, or construction zones, I think it would still be a net benefit to me.

This is already a problem, as many drivers already don't have extensive experience driving on a snowy road, dirty road, aquaplaning. Most drivers are used to asphalt/concrete roads, and have real problems the few days with rare weather & road conditions. So with little self-driving practice in future, this could be a big issue.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#43

Post by sliverstorm »

balloot wrote: post #39
prbuckley wrote: post #12

It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles. Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the ca…

I'm with you here. You could essentially build from scratch a traffic setup for autonomous vehicles, instead of retrofitting the autonomous vehicles to a current driving system. And by flying you get to avoid lots of complications that will prove very difficult to work around. No pedestrians, snow, signage, construction, etc etc.

On the other hand, traffic in the air might become a very messy problem. Last I heard autopilots are not used during takeoff and landing, so they barely deal with any traffic at all...

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#44

Post by afterburner »

jbarham wrote: post #40

There was recently a car crash here in Victoria, Australia, that resulted in the deaths of two teenagers and injuries to five others. It was apparently caused by the relatively inexperienced driver swerving to avoid a rabbit. In hindsight it would have been better if the driver hadn't swerved and the rabbit had been run over, but in some sense this is a moral choice of the type that robots can't make. In theory self…

I think this is a poor example. You could just as easily program the robot not to try so hard to avoid hitting a small animal (or at all). It's not a moral choice, it's a decision based on size and shape. Also, a robot might be less likely to swerve into other cars or dangerous locations.

There are problems for robot cars, sure, but this doesn't sound like one of them.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#45

Post by kamaal »

bagels wrote: post #32
balloot wrote: post #31

I've been saying this for years, as I took Thrun's class when he was at Stanford. Google's dirty little secret is that self driving cars are still mostly smoke and mirrors. Given relatively controlled conditions and a trained driver who can play backup when needed, they work. But if you put them in complicated situations - snow, a busy city environment, abnormal signage - watch out. The problem is that the driving mo…

One that Google has not solved, for instance, is navigating a gas station. When they fill up gas at Shoreline & Middlefield in Mountain View, I see humans doing the driving.

Approaching this problem as 'navigating around X' is a wrong way to go about it. Once you solve the problem of navigating a gas station, the next you will face is to drive around a school, or a lane where kids are playing. The list would never end.

The idea must be to come up with a generic algorithm that solves these problems as a whole. Not one specific case at a time.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#46

Post by nicholas73 »

balloot wrote: post #31

I've been saying this for years, as I took Thrun's class when he was at Stanford. Google's dirty little secret is that self driving cars are still mostly smoke and mirrors. Given relatively controlled conditions and a trained driver who can play backup when needed, they work. But if you put them in complicated situations - snow, a busy city environment, abnormal signage - watch out. The problem is that the driving mo…

I decided to test a Google self driving car as it crossed the intersection by accelerating into its broadside - no reaction at all. Well, got a reaction from the humans inside.

I recently narrowly avoided getting killed by a broadside collision by braking just in time. If I were further I would have sped up out of the way. Would a probabilistic approach handle this? Maybe they need to compile a list of special edge cases.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#47

Post by snowmaker »

prbuckley wrote: post #12

It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles. Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the ca…

Each approach has a different challenge.

For autonomous cars, the challenge is software. It's very difficult to build software that handles all the edge cases mentioned in the article. The hardware (cars) is a solved problem.

For autonomous personal flying machines, you're right that the software is easy, but the challenge is power density. The only VTOL machine that can carry humans a considerable distance without refueling is a helicopter. Helicopters are too large, disruptive, and expensive for everyone to have one. But no one has figured out how to shrink one down and still be able to carry a person.

If you compare the two approaches, one big difference is that software is improving much faster than power density. So my money would be that we solve the first one first.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#48

Post by afterburner »

prbuckley wrote: post #12

It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles. Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the ca…

When air vehicles fail they fall from a great height. They also tend to be vastly less energy efficient, at least for a personal vehicle. Maybe the second is not an issue if you go far enough into the future though...

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#49

Post by robotresearcher »

georgemcbay wrote: post #3

I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers. IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues a…

> People aren't that great at this either

The robot car has to be considerably better than people to become acceptable. This is a serious burden for the technology.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#50

Post by yen223 »

prbuckley wrote: post #20
smeyer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this? Self-driving cars seem reasonably close whereas there doesn't seem to be anything resembling what you're proposing. Also, aren't autopilot systems successful in commercial air vehicles because they operate high up away from most everything other than a few birds and other commercial air vehicles and they maintain massive separation between vehicles (compared to roads)? This wouldn't seem to sca…

In the air you have an entire 3rd dimension to play with. You can get far more density of vehicles per route. You can fly in a band lower then commercial air vehicles 300-1000 ft has hardly any vehicles flying. The self driving car always strikes me as a faster horse solution.

Being able to abstract away the 3rd dimension is a huge boon, which is why we're still doing self driving cars.

In the air you can't ignore the 3rd dimension. Every calculation your car AI was making before, will now have to grow by an order of magnitude. Even making a helicopter stay stationary in 3d space is a challenge.

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